


And the Tiger Leaps

by haeresitic



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Gen, Mentions/descriptions of trauma, Post-Shadowland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 05:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haeresitic/pseuds/haeresitic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angela reflects on being the White Tiger after the events of Shadowland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Tiger Leaps

It feels like waking up from an especially bad nightmare. You float up through thick dense fogs that clutter your lungs but your head feels increasingly light, until that one point when everything crashes around you—no, not you, you don’t crash, you don’t fall.

Can you fall lower than this?                                          

It’s a lie to say that the first thing she remembers is standing at the edge of the roof of Shadowland. She remembers a lot of things. Matt, garbed in black, horns twisting out of his head. Carlos’s twisted bloodied body on the mangled car. Her costume is still so white, so pure—the absence of any scarlet on it offends her. What a lie.

It isn’t that long ago when she’d feel queasy standing so high above the ground with nothing to stop her from tumbling over. She got cocky. She sure is stronger, faster, maybe braver. She can jump further, higher. She forgets she can still fall.

Can you fall lower than this?

She hears her coming so it means that Elektra wants to be noticed. Or maybe she’s too tired to bother with the ninja stealth thing (she’s going to puke, she swears, at the mere thought of  _ninja_ ) and her amulet-enhanced senses are still as sharp as ever. If she’s going to ram the sai through her she’s prepared for it. Ram her right through this chest where Lady Bullseye’s katana pierced her. She’s not going to put up a fight.

“This is what the Hand does. It seeks out the mightiest of warriors, and then corrupts them to do its bidding.”

She’s holding Matt’s costume—the black one, the wrong one, the one that makes her break out in cold sweat just looking at it, so she looks down at the tiles of the roof instead.

“I read the Cliff’s Notes, I know what the Hand does,” she says to her shoes, her white shoes with not even a speck of blood on it.

There are great torches all around the roof of Shadowland. There is one very near them. It’s burning as vigorously as ever, but she’s forgotten about its heat on her skin after she wakes up standing at the edge of the roof. She doesn’t feel cold. She feels numb. She can’t feel anything, except for the nausea in her stomach. It’s a let-me-stay-in-bed-Ma-my-stomach-feels-bad kind of nausea, not the nausea you get when you fall.

Can you fall lower than this?

The torch eats up the costume hungrily. Black smoke curls up to the sky now cracking as dawn approaches. Little charred bits of the costume fly around them, the devil’s skin scattered across Hell’s Kitchen. Some of them stick to her costume. Black specks on white. Impurities digging into her.

She clutches the amulet on her belt. She’s heard of Tio Hector’s addiction to it. She’s lucky, she can easily let it go, relatively speaking. She won’t get any seizures once she’s separated from the amulet; she can go back to living as Angela del Toro immediately with no side effects.

(She’ll miss the hell out of jumping across rooftops.)

“The Beast is dead. What you did under their spell isn’t yours to regret. You’re free now.”

As free as her? She’s an assassin, for god’s sake, she lives and breathes death. Is this what’s left for her? To be a disgrace to the White Tiger’s mantle, to her uncle’s legacy?

(Why is she still here?)

“The Hand may have given you this life, but it is yours to make.”

(She’s still here.)

“Do you know where he is?”

“He’s picking himself up. That’s what he does after he falls.”

It’s a day later and she’s in Ava Ayala’s bedroom. Ava stares at the amulet on her bed with eyes as wide as dish saucers. Is that how she looked like when she first held it in her hands?

Ava is both her senior and her junior. Sometimes they laugh when she calls her Tia Ava. This is not one of those times.

Once she holds those still-wide brown eyes in her gaze she lays one hand above hers. “Keep that safe for me. You know better than anyone how dangerous it can be.”

“Angie, what’re you going to do? Where’re you going?”

How will she explain it to her? That White Tiger’s done some bad things? That she needs to know where White Tiger ends and where Angela del Toro begins? Or that maybe it’s Angela that’s gone bad, and in that case she has to get away lest she taint that white mantle?

“Oh, I’ll brood on some gargoyles in the rain; I’ll be fine.”  She smiles. Ava tries to return the smile but her face is too contorted with curiousity and worry to come up with anything else but a cute grimace.  

She’ll keep her secret. She’s been keeping it for the longest time now, ever since she figured out the identity of the new White Tiger wearing her brother’s amulet not long after his death and showed up in front of her flat with the smuggest of grins. Wasn’t she angry, she’d asked her.

“A new White Tiger? A Latin@ at that? Who turns out to be my  _niece_? Yeah, I’m angry alright, I’m angry you didn’t tell me about this!”

The amulet doesn’t endow the user clairvoyance. Nobody knows that the Ayalas’ neighbour is going to get robbed in two weeks’ time, that Ava will in desperation slip the amulet around her neck, that she’s going to fight in a way that will make Tio Danny proud, that the Avengers is going to sit up and take notice and send her to a school for baby heroes.

Angela jumps off Ava’s window and reaches for the nearest branch. The amulet is now tucked safely in Ava’s drawer underneath two layers of neatly rolled socks. She swings and jumps from branch to branch to roof after roof and she’s not going to fall. 

**Author's Note:**

> In the White Tiger mini-series it was suggested that the amulet affects Angela even if she's not wearing it, and this is what I've chosen to go with here, in the hope that Angie can come back to us one day even though Ava's the White Tiger now!


End file.
